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Zombica: A Zombie Survival RTS Perspective (NEW UPDATE Jan. 30, 2013)

Reason:
It is just plain sad that with the overly saturated Zombie Game Market that nobody has developed a true RTS that focuses on the survival, base building, crafting and unit development. Many claims have been made but we decided we were tired of waiting for someone to come out with one so we kicked off a project to develop a game that does just that.

1/30/13 Progress Update:
We've been making good progress on the project and have recently added a forum and a section for feedback. We would love it if you could stop by and check it out.www.zombica.com

Crafting is a dirty word, as it implies a tree of prerequisites, where in an rts you are usually focused on the macro detail. I would like to suggest that you allow for "substandard materials" I have no metal I can't repair a metal wall? I'd just board it up, no batteries for a starter motor? Jump cables and a homemade chemical battery.

Base buillding can mean hundreds of things, having a clear message about your intentions will be key, do you mean to imply a base camp where walls can be hand placed or rather static wall you can build within? What about uprooting your group and seeking natural barriers (assuming zombies cant swim) with your backs against a river or on a bridge where there are only 2 land access points.

When we started designing gameplay we decided that we want to allow users to control the pace of the game to some extent so that we can build in an effective and immersive crafting experience so that players can craft to what extent that they don't want to salvage for goods. There is a paused mode where players can perform crafting and actual gameplay which is realtime and reactive. The reason for this is because some players (like myself) like to take time in placing buildings and reading content and not just be timing the production of units. So this will be very different from the fast paced games that are on the market today (Starcraft, AOE, COH, etc)

On the base building side you will start in zone 1 with a pre-defined haven point that you have to defend. You will be able to construct things like barricades, towers, shelters, workshops, etc. around this point and those structures can be constructed from any number of materials which are referred to as "Building Materials". So you can repair something with a different building material than what it was constructed from. We want the engine to render in such a way that those repairs are reflected visually to add to the randomness of the structures. There will be pre-defined points in each zone where you can migrate your base to those locations. At any given time a player will have only one haven that they will construct buildings in.

Thanks for the note. Strange that my response from earlier did not get posted yet. If anything we want things in the game to make sense. So if you are trying to barricade a gap in defenses you should be able to patch it with what you have available. The goal is to have users able to leverage their resources in creative ways to do things such as this. Since we're laying a crafting concept on an RTS (typically macro level) we'll be keeping it schematic based but will have a large library of schematics to pull from so it's not quite so linear as is seen in many games.

Base building incorporates constructing structures within the bounds of your haven to survive the nightly mobs of zombies and expand your haven's capabilities. You will be able to elect where within a given zone your haven is located but it may be limited to a preset number of options to promote more predictable gameplay. So base building would not be as open as Starcraft where you can build anything anywhere but it will allow for strategic decisions on which position you want to take up.